Howie Carr (3 page)

The pictures were almost four years old now. Whitey was wearing sunglasses and a white Red Sox cap as he claimed his “share” of a $14.3 million Mass Millions ticket that he had received under murky circumstances.

At the time, strolling into Lottery headquarters had seemed like a lark, but now Whitey saw it for the hubris that it was. For the first time, the cops had video of him. Not that it would matter much—during the next nine years,
America’s Most Wanted
would feature Whitey twelve times, to no avail.

The next day, Whitey and Theresa returned to Massachusetts. Just after dark, he pulled into a restaurant parking lot in Hingham.

As Theresa got out of the car, Whitey told her he was headed for Fields Corner in Dorchester, to meet Kevin Weeks. In fact he was about to drive to Malibu Beach, where Kevin Weeks would deliver Catherine Greig to him.

As for Theresa, she had some nice diamond jewelry she could hock, if times got tough. Or she could go back to being a banquet waitress, if her varicose veins didn’t act up. Sooner or later, Whitey knew, the cops would come calling, and she’d give up “Tom Baxter.” But then she’d feel guilty, and call Kevin, and Kevin would beep him. With any luck, all this would be straightened out by then, and if it wasn’t, he would have a new alias, or two, or three. For that, he was counting on his old friends from Alcatraz.

But right now, he wanted to talk to his brother Billy. In case the feds already had a pen register on Billy’s phone, they would use Eddie Phillips’s house in Quincy. Eddie worked for Billy at the State House, and the joke was that his most important qualification was that he was one of the few guys in the building shorter than Billy.

Once Whitey talked to Billy, he could get back on the road. Whitey wanted to drive and drive and drive. That’s what he’d done when he’d gone on the lam in 1955, and that was still the plan. A year later, when the feds recovered “Tom Baxter’s” Grand Marquis, in Yonkers, New York, it would have 65,000 miles on its odometer.

Whitey watched as Theresa got out of the car in front of the restaurant in Hingham, clutching her single suitcase.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

She never saw him again.

Nine years later, his brother Billy was still being questioned, under oath, about the phone call, by one of the few congressmen of either party on the committee who seemed even slightly sympathetic, Representative Henry Waxman of Los Angeles.

“Where were you,” Waxman asked Billy, “when you received the telephone call from James Bulger?” He pronounced the last name incorrectly, as “Bul-gar,” rather than “Bul-ger,” with a soft
g
.

“I was in a friend’s, an, an employee’s home,” he said. “I was asked where I would be and I received a call there.”

Waxman: “Who asked you where you would be?”

“I don’t have a specific recollection,” he said. “But the only person it possibly would have been would be his friend, Kevin Weeks.”

His ex-friend, now. Weeks had been arrested, finally, in 1999. After less than a month in the federal holding pen in Central Falls, Rhode Island, he had flipped. Overnight his nickname in Southie went from “Kevin Squeaks” to “Two Weeks.”

All-powerful a decade earlier, the Bulger gang had scattered to the winds—they were either dead, in prison, on the lam, or under house arrest. Even the youngest Bulger brother, Jackie, had just pleaded guilty to federal perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges involving Whitey’s safe-deposit box in Clearwater, Florida. The conviction cost Jackie four months in prison and, at least temporarily, his $3,778-a-month state pension.

Zip Connolly, the Bulger family’s personal FBI agent, was in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, until June 2011, unless, perhaps, he could serve up someone else, the way Kevin Weeks had delivered Connolly with his testimony in U.S. District Court.

Now Dan Burton was asking Billy what he discussed with his brother, the serial killer. Billy’s response was gibberish.

“I’m his brother,” Billy said. “He sought to call me. Or he sought to call me and I told his friend where I’d be and I received the call and it seems to me, um, that is in no way inconsistent with my devotion to my own responsibilities, my public responsibilities as a, well, at that time, uh, president of the Senate. I believe that I have always taken those as my first, my first obligation.”

Burton asked Billy if he had offered Whitey any advice. “My brother’s an older brother,” Billy said. “He doesn’t—he didn’t—come to me looking for advice.”

Four Massachusetts congressmen watched anxiously, awaiting their turns to question Billy. Not so long ago, when he had controlled congressional redistricting, many of these same politicians had flattered him, attending his St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts and laughing at his ancient jokes, donating more than generously to his campaign committee. Now they couldn’t wait to throw him overboard.

Representative Marty Meehan of Lowell took the microphone now. Before Marty had first run for Congress he had been solicitous enough of Billy’s blessing to arrange a formal introduction from one of Billy’s dearest friends, a lobbyist. Like everyone else on Beacon Hill, Meehan had considered it imperative to have the imprimatur of Mr. President before he embarked on any endeavor, political or otherwise.

Not that any of that mattered now. Meehan was ambitious, he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate someday, and as a former prosecutor he knew how to draw blood. He asked Billy about the proximity of his house to the Flemmi residence, which the feds had lately taken to calling a “clubhouse” for Whitey’s Winter Hill Gang.

“How much distance,” Meehan asked, “is there between your house and the Flemmis’?”

“Perhaps from here to the first desk.” About fifteen feet, in other words.

“Nothing ever looked suspicious over there?”

“No.”

“You’re aware Debra Davis was murdered next door?”

“Yes.” Debra Davis, one of Stevie’s girlfriends, had been twenty-six when Whitey strangled her.

Next up was John Tierney, from the North Shore of Massachusetts. He had more questions about Zip Connolly.

“Did you encourage Connolly to attend Boston College?” There was a pause, followed by a sigh. “I may have,” Billy said. “I honestly don’t recall. I would, um, I was a little older of course and Connolly would be, uh, around, and I, I could very well have.”

Tierney: “Did you write a letter of recommendation for him to attend graduate school?”

“I don’t believe so.” Then Billy’s lawyer leaned over and whispered something in his ear.

“Oh,” Billy said, nodding. “About the Kennedy School of Government, I am reminded I think I did send a letter over to the Kennedy School.”

Tierney: “Mr. Connolly worked on some of your campaigns?”

“I believe he probably did.”

The committee counsel brought up the subject of one of Whitey’s hitmen, John Martorano, who had already pleaded guilty to twenty murders between 1965 and 1982. Martorano had testified under oath that Whitey once told him that Billy had ordered Zip Connolly to keep Whitey out of trouble.

“He said that?” Billy asked. “And was Mr. Martorano there when I did? Was he present?”

“He understood,” the lawyer said, “that you had done that at some point.”

“I see,” said Billy. “Well, if I ever did say something like that uh, influence him to stay on the straight and narrow, if that’s what’s meant by it I could well have said it....I think it’s a pretty innocent comment, if in fact I made it. I have no recollection but I don’t want to quarrel with that source.”

When Billy was asked about his relationship with Kevin Weeks, he looked weary. He mentioned how he knew Kevin’s brother, a onetime advance man for Governor Mike Dukakis. And how Kevin would sometimes stop by Billy’s home on East Third Street, unannounced, and they would talk.

“I think I was inflicting my advice upon him,” Billy said. “He seems very young to me. His brother is in Chicago and I know I told him that he should go to Chicago and that he should take his wife and family and go to Chicago.”

Instead, he pleaded guilty to being an accessory to five of Whitey’s murders and his testimony sent Zip Connolly to prison for nine years. He wasn’t so young anymore either. He was forty-seven.

Then it was Burton’s turn again, and this time he came at Billy from out of left field. Had Billy ever tried to arrange for Zip Connolly, the convicted-felon FBI agent, to be appointed police commissioner of the city of Boston? The crowd murmured at this new information.

“Can you give me an idea of the year of that?” Billy said, and Burton instantly deduced that Billy was stalling for time to come up with an answer that wouldn’t cost him his job as president of the University of Massachusetts.

“Did you recommend him?” Burton repeated.

“Excuse me, who’s the mayor at that time?” It was Ray Flynn, Billy’s neighbor from South Boston, a political rival whose popularity Bulger had often envied, and whose intellect he had always disparaged.

Burton stared at him, waiting for Billy to respond, and Billy stared back.

“Maybe way back,” Billy finally said. “Many years before, there was a neighbor of ours who was mayor, and I may have suggested John to Raymond Flynn...I may have suggested him as a candidate, somebody that might be looked at.”

As the morning wore on into the afternoon, Billy delivered more and more of his answers in the same vague manner—in the passive voice, always prefaced with a claim of inability to recall anything of substance. No one would ever be able to prove he’d lied, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt.

Did Billy know a crooked state cop convicted of leaking information to him through Kevin Weeks?

“I don’t recall him but I’ve been told that I know him.” Did the FBI ever visit his home?

“I’m told they did but I do not recall it.”

Whitey’s bank safe-deposit box in London—the one the bank called Billy at home about because Whitey had listed him as the contact person—when, Mr. Bulger, did you learn about that bank account in Piccadilly?

“Whenever it appeared in the newspaper.”

Did you know that your brother and his crew had stored the largest criminal arsenal ever confiscated in New England in their clubhouse fifteen feet from your home?

“I didn’t know. Whoever put them there didn’t tell me.” Were you responsible for the smears of Dan Burton in the Boston papers?

“If there were any ad hominems they didn’t come from me.” They touched on allegation after allegation in which a state employee had gone after Whitey, only to be transferred, or have his pay frozen, or his staff cut. Billy said he knew nothing about any of it.

He even claimed he had nothing to do with the hiring policies at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which he’d personally set up and then handed over to a former mailman from Southie named Francis Xavier Joyce. Franny Joyce had been Billy’s top aide at the State House, as well as the tin whistle player in Billy’s band, the Irish Volunteers.

“I told Joyce, do the best you can.”

Joyce had immediately hired the daughter of one of Whitey’s hitmen. He kept on one of Stevie Flemmi’s old Mob associates as a garage cashier. Both quickly began stealing large amounts of cash. Then Joyce hired Theresa Stanley’s daughter, Nancy.

“She was a very good worker,” Billy told Burton.

But mostly, the questions were about Whitey.

Burton: “Did you know he was involved in narcotics trafficking?”

Bulger: “No.”

“Did you know anything about the Winter Hill Mob?” “The what?”

“The gang he was connected to.”

“No, I didn’t.” Pause. “I don’t think I met anybody from that.”

“You didn’t know Flemmi?” Burton asked.

“I did know Steve Flemmi, yes.”

“Well, he was part of that gang. You didn’t know he was part of that gang?”

“No.”

“Did you know what Steve Flemmi did for a living?”

“I thought he had a restaurant somewhere. And I thought he had a club, or something like that.”

It was the Marconi Club, in Roxbury. The Boston police eventually dug up its basement floor, looking for more bodies.

“Any indication your brother was involved in murder?” “Someplace. I saw it in the paper.”

Most of the reviews of Billy’s testimony would not be kind. In a poll that morning, one TV station found that 52 percent of Massachusetts residents wanted Bulger removed as president of UMass. By that evening, the percentage of people in favor of his firing had risen to 63.

Burton questioned Billy Bulger about yet another legislative attempt to punish honest police who had gone after Whitey. In 1982, a rider was anonymously added to the state budget that would have forced the retirement of several senior State Police, one of whom had authorized the bugging of a West End garage that Whitey was using as his headquarters.

“Did you talk to anybody about that investigation?” Burton asked.

“I don’t think so,” Billy answered again, much to Burton’s annoyance.

“The point is,” Burton said, “you’re saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ You know, we’ve had a lot of people testify before the committee who’ve had what I call convenient memory loss and what I want to know is, can you categorically say that you did not talk to anybody about that investigation?”

Billy considered his words carefully before replying.

“My preference is to say that categorically I cannot recall ever talking with anybody.”

Burton sighed and reiterated how odd it seemed that the president of the state Senate, a renowned micromanager, could forget a no-fingerprints amendment to the state budget that was aimed solely at destroying the careers of a handful of police officers, including one who was causing “heartburn,” as Burton put it, for the Senate president’s gangster brother.

Burton: “Did you speak to anyone about the investigation?” “I don’t believe so, no.”

“You don’t believe so? Categorically, can you say you didn’t?”

Billy started to make a point about the nuances of legislation, and how surely the congressmen questioning him must understand. But as he studied their faces, he realized that this was one sneaker he couldn’t put a shine on. So he reverted to form.